Left Face
Join Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson while they talk politics and community engagement in Pikes Peak region.
Left Face
Budget Battles: Veteran Impact, Military Readiness, and Privatization Challenges
This episode addresses the far-reaching effects of budget cuts on veterans and military personnel, focusing on legal updates, community activism, and the implications for national security. Navigating misinformation while advocating for veterans’ rights, hosts emphasize the importance of maintaining robust support systems for those who have served.
• Discussion on the impact of government budget cuts on veterans
• Importance of credible information sources in navigating veterans' affairs
• Community protests highlighting veterans' rights
• Insights into recent legal rulings affecting veterans
• Exploration of budget cuts’ effects on agencies like NASA
• Paradox of military readiness amid funding reductions
• Call to action for collective dialogue around veterans' needs
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Left Face. This is the podcast that covers veterans topics in the Pikes Peak region, and we are covering both local, national and international political topics that are relevant to veterans. I am your host, dick Wilkinson, and I am joined by my co-host today, adam Gillard. How are you doing, adam? I'm doing good, dick. How are you? I'm doing very good. I am happy to be here. I've definitely doing, adam. I'm doing good, dick. How are you? I'm doing very good. I am happy to be here. I've definitely just, man, I've had a lot on my mind as far as this episode, and so I'm excited to dig into the conversation today. It's Impacted Veterans.
Speaker 1:Everything we're going to talk about today is direct Impacted Veterans.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we definitely, like we said, no shortage of things coming out of this new administration where we have to stand on top of these topics to make sure we're educating people properly, and I've been talking with some folks about collecting resources and topics that we want to run up the chain and things like that. And one thing I always harp on is make sure that you have good sources, make sure you're actually looking at the sources that you're reading this information from because you don't want to be a part of the problem.
Speaker 1:Correct. There's a publication out there and it comes up every now and then it gets sent to me as like a link for a headline for something, or I saw that it actually comes up pretty far up in the Google search results on certain news topics. Hindustan Times. There's no such place as Hindustan on the map right now. That is sometimes the name for like a certain region in Pakistan and like North Afghanistan. It's just, you know, it's a not real nation state, yeah, but it's sort of a tribal region word, yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, like Cascadia.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, there's but or what's it called the Catalonian like enclave within Spain, right? Like they want to be their own country but they're not quite yet. That's kind of what these people maybe are in, I don't know, but anyways, it's not a place where there's a government or a news agency or any place of structure, right? But then they write on topics that are, I don't know, sensational, I guess, but they write on topics that are I don't know sensational, I guess. But it doesn't seem like it's totally a propaganda hole.
Speaker 1:You know what I'm saying, but I can't say that it's credible either. But it's out there, it's part of the noise and it's pretty far up in the noise. So anyways, that's just one that always. When I saw it yesterday when I was searching for some topic, I thought dang, there it is again Hindustan Times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, obviously, if Google listens to this conversation, it pops it up on my news feed now.
Speaker 1:It will, and then also you'll notice the Gulf of Hindustan may show up on Google Maps soon.
Speaker 2:I have been enjoying people renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 1:They just keep throwing out more and more vulgar names for it.
Speaker 2:That's always good. This last week we saw um some protests going on downtown.
Speaker 1:Uh, I don't know if you got a chance to swing by there, but, but I was there for a few hours. I didn't.
Speaker 2:I wasn't in the area. No, yeah, it was. Uh. I actually signed up to do the parasol patrol. So like you walk with uh an umbrella, so if there's any like protesters yelling like towards kids and families, and like that you just kind of protect the kids and families from the noise and stuff like that, which is more up my alley.
Speaker 2:I'm not like a big rah-rah guy and things like that. So your job is to stand there quietly and stoically and not react to people yelling people things at you, and I can do that. We had one guy that was driving around in a truck about four or five times while I was there, like just driving through with his Trump stickers on, yelling and screaming at us. So, yeah, it definitely drew some emotional reactions from folks, but I think we got a lot more horns honking and supporting us and there was a couple hundred people out there, you know it was definitely a really good showing, so it's something that's probably going to be happening more and more, I think.
Speaker 2:So we keep seeing the way that the administration is going. I don't know if you heard, but we have a king now. Did you see that tweet?
Speaker 1:No, I mean I'm familiar.
Speaker 2:I was aware that we have a king, but there's a tweet about it.
Speaker 2:Tell me yeah, so he canceled the congestion traffic law in New York he canceled that new tax and then at the end he said long live King Don. Or something like that at the end of his tweet Wow, yeah, it's just. And folks will write it off and say oh yeah, he's just joking, he's just trying to rile you up. But he's already committed treason once, he's already attacked the Capitol once, and now he's sitting there with immunity where he's saying that the Supreme Court doesn't even know how to decide what's legal or not Right. He only he can interpret the law.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, one way I see that coming to reality right now is the whole is Elon Musk in charge of Doge or not? When the Trump administration goes to court over cases where people are saying that they got fired or that there's some illegal cuts going on in their organization, then the answer is Elon Musk is not in charge of Doge. But then Donald Trump basically every day says Elon Musk is doing a great job being in charge of.
Speaker 2:Doge. He's literally talking to the world from behind the Oval Office desk, the Resolute desk. It's crazy how much they did that CNN. I can't remember who it was. They just did an interview together. Oh, hannity, that's who it was.
Speaker 1:But my thing is he knows that if his lawyers, basically he can live in, he can say whatever. And if his lawyers go to court and say, well, here's the real legal filing, and Donald Trump says the exact opposite thing one hour later, every single day, it doesn't matter at all. You know what I'm saying? So that's the weird situation that we're in is that he can make up whatever he wants to say and as long as his lawyers go to court and say, well, this is is what we wrote down, so this is what's really going on, is what's on paper well, and even that, that one meeting must said I'm going to say some things that are wrong yeah like cool, we know you're going to say some things that are wrong like this is to like lead off with that, though it's like don't fact check me, I'm going to be wrong yeah, this is, this is stream of consciousness.
Speaker 1:slash, government planning, slash. You know everything else right here live. Well, that's the topic we're going to cover in a minute is about some of the Doge activity, but let's just get our viewers caught up on one thing, adam, before we move on to that. You know, court case is finally done, done, done. That you were involved with, yeah, official.
Speaker 2:When we were recording last week, we were kind of waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision. They made a decision not to take up jurisdiction on it, so that kind of reverts back to the district court's ruling, which was that it was unconstitutional, and then we kind of had to wait for the city to. I think they were kicking around some ideas and they were trying to look for other avenues.
Speaker 1:Last week yeah.
Speaker 2:Which I mean at that point. It's just ridiculous Like you're trying that hard to subvert the will of the voters, like that's just everybody's kind of like when the law says you're doing something unconstitutional and then the next level says the same thing like listen, just listen, man. The next level says the same thing Listen.
Speaker 2:Just listen, man, so they ended up coming out with a statement saying they're disappointed but they'll honor this, and they removed her from the ballot. So it's done for this round. It cannot happen in April. But if Donaldson gets reelected in April, I could see it being on the 26th ballot. They're never going to stop trying this. So you know, now the focus turns to doing good things with this tax money that comes in and, you know, making sure that people that keep jobs or get new jobs recognize how they got those jobs, so that they keep voting for the people that are fighting for them. That's true, you know.
Speaker 1:Yep, and I think a good thing to focus on is 18 months at least between launching the wreck sales and the opportunity to repeal it, so that time frame is a long time for there to be positive influence. Positive, you know, not necessarily a lot of revenue, tax being flowed through, but proof that the danger and harms that they were talking about don't exist. Right, right, the boogeyman has to vanish in those 18 months.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think I don't know how it wouldn't right.
Speaker 2:You know Right Because, like we've said all along it, like cannabis, has always been here, it's just people are driving less to get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, the boo us to get it. The boogeyman has been here the whole time. Things are cool.
Speaker 1:That's it exactly. That illusion should vanish if we get through 18 months. I agree that even if it was going to lose abysmally, they would still put it on the ballot again, just as sort of like hey, we had to invade Iraq twice to seal the deal, They'll come back around.
Speaker 2:It's good to finally put it to bed. It's kind of a surreal moment where it actually was done. I've been on this since we started filling out the petitions, filling in signatures. It's definitely nice to finally have something done and get something positive for the city, because this is so much tax money. It could really define what we do as a city going forward, being able to fund some of the programs around here. Looking at public transportation even the police academy use funds to fund that thing. Get that built so we can rebuild our police force. It can define our city for a generation or two here.
Speaker 1:It's good to see. Well, thanks for taking that on, adam and being involved.
Speaker 2:You know by name mostly because the lawyers did most of the work. You know, pure luck that I got that.
Speaker 1:But thanks for thanks for doing that. So all right back to Doge. So today's topics we're going to cover are things about, you know, going out of the federal government to have direct impact on active duty military it's about to happen. And then us as veterans, both sides of the coin, are getting the doge effect. And Pete Hexeth, Secretary Hexeth, is on board full blast, as we expected he would be. So which one do you want to start with, Adam? Do you want to start with the defense budget cuts or do you want to start with the VA?
Speaker 2:um, you know, for an ungeneral kind of federal job stuff so first to kind of frame it for for this area, we're looking at like 15 to 20 percent veteran population. Yeah, right, and that's the veteran population. We still have tons of active duty, yes, tons of contractors. I mean, you're probably looking at, 60% of our workforce is tied into the defense sector. So when we're talking about impacts here, this is so huge for our area and on top of the other conversations of moving space force and things like that so I don't know.
Speaker 2:Let's start with the government, the big feds.
Speaker 1:So promises made, promises kept is what they say over on the other side of the aisle. And here we are. The promises have been kept. The axe has swung, the Grim Reaper sickle has passed through many agencies already in the last few weeks and what I've seen, what we've all seen on the news, is that somewhat indiscriminate job cuts or offers for resignation with some kind of severance, and that's happened on the orders of tens of thousands of government employees as far as brought, you know, over the whole government Right, and people are taking the taking the cut, you know like they're taking the severance, and I think they're doing that because the writing would be on the wall that if, if don't take it now, it might only be a month before it's not there anymore and they just say, well, that was nice, but you just don't come back and we're not going to pay you and that's it. So that part you know.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine being in that position right now A lot of those federal workers, because a lot have been let go illegally because they're in the unions and so there's going to be more lawsuits against them and things like that. But what's that going to do for them?
Speaker 1:I'll tell you, the administration is not concerned about that at all.
Speaker 2:No, no, yeah, there's no pressure from that they are blatantly removing workers' rights and union busting. So, yeah, they're not going to give a shit about that. The thing that bugs me the most is that when you look at the GS workers, like our government workers, they are a lot bigger workforces than the contractors that they want to hand stuff over to. When you look at a lot of contractors, you're so focused on your scope of work you can't bleed over that because you get in trouble for not flexible, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:whereas, like your GS workers can catch a lot of extra BS and kind of wear the glue that holds that stuff together so now we're gonna get rid of that and we're gonna pay people twice as much to be contractors and with limited scale, with limited scope. Yeah, bad things are gonna come from that. Administratively, you know a lot of things are gonna fall apart. And when you look at, they've been cutting the probationary period folks, bad things are going to come from that. Administratively, you know a lot of things are going to fall apart. And when you look at they've been cutting the probationary period folks, which is heavily veterans also, you know people coming out, you know, jumping into the federal service.
Speaker 2:Oh sure, those new folks are the folks that are like busting their ass to like make it, make it, whereas you have people that have been up there for 30, 40 years, that are GS, 15, sess, that just are sitting in positions, kind of clogging things.
Speaker 1:They keep that. There's definitely some oxygen being sucked out of the room by some senior folks I mean we all it's. You know that's just always part of bureaucratic government, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just if you're looking to save money, just cutting off those the people that are just starting out, uh, it's the least return on investment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, correct, yeah. So they're gonna, they're gonna be stuck.
Speaker 2:You know, these people that haven't worked in you know 15 years are gonna be stuck trying to run their offices again without the help that they're used to. Yes, so those offices are going to start failing for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the yeah's right. Some of the senior folks that have had two or three layers of administration underneath of them and then entire layers of that just disappeared. Talk about breaking business flows and workflows. I mean some of that is the point right Of breaking their work flows.
Speaker 2:Exactly that's what people want. But, how does it get? Put back together, right that's the well so many of these services that they're breaking up to are. They're needed in a lot of communities. So I mean, I don't think they even care about putting it back together. I think that's true. It hurts the point.
Speaker 1:That's true. Um, well, near and dear to me is NASA. I work in the space industry for our listeners and so I pay attention to what NASA's got going on, but I don't work with them directly on a contract or anything like that. Right now they are about to be operating at their smallest workforce since the Apollo missions shut down. They are taking a massive I want to say it was like 40% of their contracts are going away.
Speaker 2:Spacex. He's just taking the money that's supposed to help the public and provide us jobs and a good economy and just handing it off to the oligarchs. It's gross. It's so blatant.
Speaker 1:I wonder how long, as we do in the intelligence community, you say follow the money. Um, will there be any amount of time or, uh, what you might even think of as a reasonable cooling off period? Before you know, cut nasa's budget. Six months later, basically, nasa's like we can't even mop the floors, we can't, much less launch a rocket. You know, and then you know, six months after that, all these new contracts get cut. Um, is that, you know, with, with, not nasa, with companies instead of nasa? Um, if the overt program is to privatize, there's probably a legal way to do that. Even if there's conflict of interest involved, there's probably a legal way to redo those appropriations right well, I think that's why they're leaving him off of the.
Speaker 2:Uh, the doge had had a doge list.
Speaker 1:Yes, because that conflict. So, yeah, he just gets to stand in the corner and whisper, you know, and not be on paper but not be liable on paper, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, so he gets all the authority none in the corner and whisper, you know and not be on paper but not be liable on paper, right yeah?
Speaker 1:So he gets all the authority, none of the responsibility and that went back to where the president has the beautiful, you know wide open door of. He can't have a conflict of interest really.
Speaker 1:You know, like a president can't, you know not anymore. So he can basically say Elon's in charge and then file court papers and say he's not in charge. So, man, I hope that it doesn't just turn into that much of an ugly direct you know one for one quote unquote kind of tradeoff. I hope it doesn't. But I mean, step one happened already. Right, we can't deny that step one happened, and are we just going to not do space stuff like on the civil side? Is it only going to be defense, or you know what happens there, I don't know there's been so much money given to the commercial side anyways.
Speaker 2:Yes, Like right now, his whole point of taking away the government funding is to stop other startups and things like that. He's trying to like consolidate oh sure Stream in the base, yeah, so like any new startups, have to fall underneath him anyways, so he'll be able to collect all the sure pyramid scheme it yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get to decide which level you're at, so fair well that the takeaway, and we'll finish this part on what I've seen as a follow-on impact, which makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:But it's a ripple effect and, man, if ripples are in a tight, controlled space, they can actually get bigger, right Like the harmonics can cause damage, and so what we're seeing is some of this bounce back.
Speaker 1:I've seen in the last just two days so this is like hot off the breaking news as far as podcast goes that civil servants that were not fired, were not offered any kind of severance, did not assume that their position was at risk, are going ahead and jumping ship anyway, even if they're not qualified for retirement. They're saying, hey, basically this work environment is so volatile I don't feel secure here. A lot of the people that I relied on in my own department or in the next department over are getting fired or resigning. So I don't want to be one of the last people on this ship, you know, because I have no idea what's going to happen and so they're leaving. So even the people that we think we're gaining efficiency by saying, well, they were not essential, essential people are leaving because what somebody thinks, you know, these not essential people are actually much more required than anyone's willing to admit yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And these folks that are leaving, they're not, you know, just folks that you pick up on. Even janitors need to have security clearances.
Speaker 1:Sure, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:So there's so much more that goes into hiring these folks and getting them into the system. They're not easily replaceable.
Speaker 1:And so I guess what we're saying there is if somebody, if Congress, let's say this goes to the heads roll for the next two years, years, and let's say that congress flips back blue and they start trying to appropriate and hire people back, we're talking two years from now, before that could really take place, that at the, you know at the soonest. And then how long does it take and how much money does it take to rehire? I'm not saying all of them, but even if we just wanted to bring back 30 of all the people that are leaving right now, I think that would almost erase all the savings, because that hiring, vetting and clearances, everything else, training You're hiring people and then they're in a six-month, one-year training program and even if we wanted to bring back 30% of the people that we got rid of in the last month, the cost would be outrageous and that's going to have to happen in some of these places.
Speaker 2:Well, we kind of saw it quickly happen where they fired the nuclear watchdogs, the folks who were kind of watching the arsenal, and then quickly realized like, oh, we need to resend these and actually, you guys come back to work, please.
Speaker 1:Yes, Yep, yeah, we got to see that on a compressed timeline All the other cuts could follow the same timeline, just on a longer, or the same process just on a longer timeline.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because that crystal ball, the nuclear industry, that's always a top priority when it comes to those administrations. So they quickly realized that mess up. Yeah, some of the other ones are going to be a slow burn.
Speaker 1:Aviation. Oh my goodness, cuts at the freaking Aviation Administration right With all the plane crashes and all the problems that are going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, another one yesterday. Yeah, it was two days ago, that was in Canada. No, there was another one. Oh, there's another one. Well, there's one in. Arizona like two days ago, it's too small, yeah, where they crash, and again that's going to be an air tower thing.
Speaker 1:Yes, you know, two planes flying south, and yet they came through with the sickle and said hey, everybody that wants to retire, everybody that wants to quit, get out of here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's one of the most highly stressful jobs Hard to train, hard to get qualified and you're going to offer somebody a carrot like that, like early retirement. Oh yeah, I'm taking that.
Speaker 1:And it's a safety whatever you know. They basically have security clearances in their type of world and they've got all the safety restrictions of, you know, no drinking and no drugs and all this other stuff and constant supervision of how much they sleep and that kind of stuff right, yeah, just like they're a part of the air crew basically right, yeah, air crew. Exactly yeah, they have those air crew restrictions so that's not easy.
Speaker 2:That's not easy to get somebody to do that. Now we're thousands of people. That's terrible. Yeah, yeah, people are falling on the stars.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a no end in sight. We don't know what. We don't know yet. We don't know what the impacts of all this will be. It doesn't feel like it could be good but saving money at what cost?
Speaker 2:yeah, there we go exactly, and I think a lot of folks that voted for this they're uh, they're kind of seeing it, but they're too proud to say like, maybe this is too much yes, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:People are still like they're still.
Speaker 2:I mean, when he just said that ukraine started the war, they're like well, yeah, they did. They were pretty aggressive. Oh, come on, come on, man. Another country clearly invaded them and you guys are just outrageous.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just the whole.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's so dystopian man you're never going to get buyer's remorse from the people that voted for Donald Trump.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:It just doesn't matter. They could deport their own grandmother or mother, steal them out of their home and they'd be like I think he's probably doing something useful. It's not possible to get buyer's remorse out of those people. We're not going to wait for that. Well, some folks may have buyer's remorse in the military coming up soon because the statement that was put out by Pete Hegseth this week, secretary of Defense, he picked up on the Doge steamroll and he said I want every department of the military, as far as like Department of the Army, department of the Navy, the major branches, I want them to bring to me proposals for an 8% budget cut starting in 2026 and for every five years and four more years after that. So five years in a row, 8% reduction every year.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, we talked earlier about how people most government agencies are operating at like 60% manning already, right, so we're already undermanned. Equipment is hard to acquire and get money because budgets are never handed down in time, so you only have money for a very short period of time. You try to spend like hell for that month or two, but it is so incredibly hard to operate and maintain a workforce that's properly trained and equipped. You know, as it is right now. And then he wants to keep cutting and when you first brought this up, too, I asked you know well, where is he talking about cutting? If you're talking cutting equipment, people like my biggest concern, he's just gonna start chopping people I, I don't know right.
Speaker 1:I mean, and that's the thing is, the people who have been able to report on the memo that went from the SecDef out to the, you know, four stars, was that? You know, by Monday of next week we need a plan, and so that level of detail is not out there yet. I don't think Hegseth has put any emphasis on how that would happen. I think he's open for what I'm sure would be creative ideas from the four stars and the secretaries of those services to say, well, if we're really going to do this, this is what's going to have to happen. The way the military thinks. I feel like we're much more likely. This is the way we think is okay, we're going to can a program of record or one specific platform, a weapons platform or something like that, and instead of saying, okay, we're going to take 2% out of personnel, 2% out of base operations, 2% out of combat operations, and go through and slice the pie up and, like, sprinkle it around.
Speaker 1:That's not, we're modular, you know it's like just take this whole can and throw it away. You know, that's how we like to do it. So I feel like that's what the secretaries of those services are going to show up on Monday and be like well, we're going to stop flying this helicopter, we're going to stop floating this type of ship and that're going to stop floating this type of ship and we're going to save money like that.
Speaker 2:It's going to be interesting because they're going to have to factor in cutting their GS positions and hiring more contractors, which they're going to cost more. To backfill there's so many moving pieces right now.
Speaker 1:We've seen firsthand in the military, and I think it does happen in the military a little bit different than it happens in the civilian branches of government and just departments of government, in that when they come down and kind of say, hey, you guys aren't flying that airplane anymore, no, that really stops happening. There is no replacement, the plane doesn't come back, the troops get retrained, the civilians go home, and that whole thing just shuts all the way down. And so I do think that if the Navy said, hey, this middle-sized ship that could be replaced by this other one that we've already got, that whole thing just goes away. And so there's contractors, there's ship maintenance people there's probably a few thousand sailors per boat that they just say reduce the manning and release the contracts. Like, those people don't work here anymore, they can go build ships for some Chinese flag company over in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Like we don't, we don't care you know Like, so I don't see a replacement at a higher cost, because I don't see a replacement happening at all, and I think that you know. Is it realistic that 40% we're talking about 40% over five years? No, that's not possible.
Speaker 2:Right, you know that's not going to happen, it's just not possible.
Speaker 1:But the idea of cut, cut, cut, cut, year after year, that's happened before. I don't think it's ever ran for, you know, more than maybe two years in a row.
Speaker 2:Like everybody will start out with some big. There was an old Air Force chief of staff, general Welsh, and he got the word that he had to cut workforce by X amount by you know, in five years, and he was like, well, I'll do it in a year. It just hacked people and like we lost so many like of the support personnel and everybody had to become experts on you know all the support jobs and things like that he has to do like another tour, as like chief of staff and he got turned down because like it was the bloodbath.
Speaker 2:It was nasty for us you know, at the operational level, Like it's just crazy that they don't think about these cuts. They, just like you said, they'll hack a whole system off.
Speaker 1:Now here's the thing that was contradictory that I think should be concerning for our active duty brothers and sisters out there is that Secretary Hegseth said we're going to put the military in a war footing. We're going to be. We want you to be combat ready and lethal, like right now, at all times, like heightened readiness in the face of a lower op tempo, right, but we want you to be just on as your seat, super, super ready, yeah, and we want to reduce all of your budgets by 40 those two things don't go together.
Speaker 1:Readiness costs money and when we ramp up for deployment and go into a high up-tempo mode for the military where they say, hey, no, really, like over the next three years, here's all the units that are going to deploy, we know exactly how many troops are going to be in these locations and that means we've got a year out, two years out, to start getting these training plans put together.
Speaker 1:That costs a ton of money. Right, to get that readiness so that you know you've got 10,000 people in a brigade that are multiple combat brigades ready to go. That doubles the budget of that unit versus walking around in the woods out here at Fort Carson. If you're walking around in the woods at Fort Carson all year long, it costs you personnel and nothing else. But if you have to take those people and go to three different training sites to get prepared to deploy and you have to do a medical push for thousands and thousands of people, right, it doubles the cost of that unit's operation. Right, and I don't, you can't. Yeah, soldiers carry a lot of stuff on their back and sure you can put more stuff in their pack, but you can't replace the things that are required to deploy that process is very well tested and true.
Speaker 1:right now We've been doing that you know rinse and repeat for the last 25 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you, as you talk about being in that heightened state, I just always think back to. You know, all the suicides that we're having at you know, in the veteran community. You know, and it's because you're at a constant heightened state for so long like it that leaves a watermark on you, you know and people trying to learn how to process that when they come back into the civilian world or even while they're still in. It's a struggle and now we're telling people again that you know, with less money, with less resources.
Speaker 1:We're going to tie on the rope. Expect you to perform at the same level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there's going to be a lot of repercussions like that. Yeah, we're going to take a lot of steps backward, I think, when it comes to mental health.
Speaker 1:Mental health and that is one small flavor in the mixture of unit readiness and morale. Right, bottom line People we've got, like you say, even when there's relatively enough money, resources and everything else, you've still got. You know the Army base has five DUIs a day because they have so many people there. Right, those signs at the gate that say you know how many days since a DUI or how many days whatever, like they're just jokes, almost right. And that's when things are kind of fat, dumb and happy right.
Speaker 2:It's funny because the Air Force has those and like if a unit has like two, yeah, like they're getting their asses too, like you're there on the weekends and things like that, like I was on Fort Carson and I'd drive off, and those units are in the hundreds, hundreds it's insane, right, insane, um.
Speaker 1:and so if that's, you know, if that's the case, when we, like, I say, when we're not totally just strapped for people and resources and everything else, and we actually can take Thursday afternoon off to go take time with your family, right, if you're some of those units you're able to do that, right, they're like, hey, we don't work on Thursdays, you pay your bills on Thursday morning and you go see, take your kids out on Thursday afternoon right, you have an appointment.
Speaker 1:You can't do that when 40% of everything disappears, right? Because you're going to be painting the buildings yourself. Right, you're going to be repainting the parking lots yourself. You know we're going to be back to all base maintenance. It's going to be on the back of those service members in between training rotations, right, I mean, that's it. You go training rotation, base maintenance rotation and you're literally the just, you know, the handyman type people. They got like 200 of you. You go out and just do projects all over base.
Speaker 2:Right when I was stationed in north carolina they had prisoners coming on base to do the cleaning. Sure, weeds and seeds stuff and things like that, like with. We know for-profit prisons are picking up again yeah, I could see more, more bases leaning towards prisoners or privates, the price is about the same right, yeah, you get less talk back from the prisoners.
Speaker 1:Yes, so but yeah, the labor, the labor is the labor and I'm, you know, the again unit readiness and morale really suffers when you have to go cut grass on base for 30 days in a row, all day, every day. You're out there swinging weed, whackers and stuff. You know like you want to talk about people getting a dui right. Stand out in the sun in georgia for 40 days cutting grass when you're. You know your job is to drive trucks right, yeah, next thing.
Speaker 1:You know, like everybody got in trouble that like bad things happened.
Speaker 2:You know that movie jarhead I think shows a good it does a really good job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that training training.
Speaker 2:You're at the peak training and you just hold, you, hold, you hold. You go crazy man. Yeah. So you're a trained killer out there. Weed whacking, weed whacking, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yep, and the hurry up and wait piece. Yeah, it drives you crazy, and that's Hegseth's memo basically.
Speaker 2:It was like we're going to get into, yeah, and I'm saying the way that we're going right now. I don't think people they'll be waiting long, though, like I think they're, they'll have places to go.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? The so people that are getting out of the work?
Speaker 1:you're saying, no, I'm saying, like our military, yeah, oh, wars, conflicts, we're gonna have more conflicts yeah, well, I guess you will get to throw that memo in the trash if we end up in a two-front war, right, like the reductions won't exist. So you know that is true, right, I didn't think about that. Well, we won't touch that topic too hard. But Donald Trump is trying to negotiate the end of the Ukraine war without Ukrainian involvement. So we'll see how, a week from now, how that's going. I get the feeling that a week from now, it may be whatever deal is happening, it may be a done deal.
Speaker 2:You know Well because he initially asked for half of their natural resources. And Ukraine said you know, sit and spend on that. And now he's saying Ukraine started the war.
Speaker 1:Yes, Like it's such a blatant, like you know bully tactic.
Speaker 2:And just the way that he can change words and get people to change their thoughts on something Something as easy as Russia invaded Ukraine. They started this, they are the ones doing this and they're singing Trump's praises.
Speaker 1:Rewrite history.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the rewrite history and we talked about it a little last week where the word fascism? They try to use it on both sides, like no, it is a right-wing ideal ideology. Yes, like when ever you know a left-wing person is in there. Everything we do is communist. You call us communist all the time, but now that there's a fascist there, they're trying to use it. As you know, the left has fascist too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no no like this is how education works. Words mean something. We need to know what they mean and stick to that, because that double speak from 1984 is like a reality now, it is now what?
Speaker 1:if we all have to learn russian, then words won't mean the same thing I know, yeah, I I don't know if I think we'll be all right. We, you know, I think we'll survive. Uh, I do like alternative history books, though, where, uh, and I don't read books, but I like that, I like to dabble in it and read a little bit about it, just kind of get the idea in my head of like, if you know, the world war two had not gone the way it did, and oh, you know that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Dramatical High Castle.
Speaker 1:Dramatical High Castle, yeah which I love that author, philip K Dick. He's one of my favorite, you know he's one of my only authors that I actually like.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know those kind of things are really cool. So you know, we'll see, maybe we get a round two. Those are always sci-fi, kind of futuristic. Maybe they just didn't realize there was a the end of World War III. The reality came together. They just had to include that next round of stuff in there. I mean, nostradamus said there was three of them?
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, we'll see Well next week we'll find out how we're doing. As far as if Europe is back into the hey, we did say they want to roll the clock back. We want to go back to the League of Nations and to the war cabinet and everything else, and that's back when the Eastern front of Europe was shaky and unstable. You know, everything was up for grabs, right? So this is you get to be a world player and you want to have the fight way off in the back corner of your backyard, but they're still on your property, right, you know you get to be the big dog calling the shots, right, and and that's kind of how Donald Trump sees it is, the eastern edge of the western world is still in my backyard, and so I'll let them fight over there and make all the stink they want, and then I'll just come over and call the fight whenever I want. And that's how he's kind of. Again back to, that is 1930, 1940. And how could we just sit on top of everything and be in charge, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's going to come to a head pretty quickly of everything and be in charge, right. Yeah, it's gonna come to a head pretty quickly. You know, I think the European leaders they've known for a while but they're understanding that we're not there they knew, but it's a scary thought, yeah and the whole thing with, like us, providing that security to folks. That was so that they wouldn't go nuclear. It was to help stop nuclear proliferation.
Speaker 2:And so now that we're pulling back and saying like, nope, america first, this is our continent over here and that's it. Other countries are going to start looking at nuclear options. Greenland needs some nukes, yeah that place is so strategic for us when it comes to what we do.
Speaker 1:I think they need nukes to defend themselves from us. Yeah, we're coming watch out Greenland alright, next week update on Greenland's sovereignty and Russia's war in the Ukraine. Thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Left Face. We'll catch you next week. Take care, take care.
